NEW YORK POLICE TAKE BROAD STEPS IN FACING TERROR

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and JUDITH MILLER

Published: February 15, 2004

The New York Police Department, working with city health officials, federal authorities and other agencies, has been preparing for a possible attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, perhaps the most daunting threat facing municipalities in a post-9/11 world.

Meeting in secret and conducting complex drills, the department has brought together government agencies in a broad effort for much of the last year. In doing so, it has put together a program that some national security and law enforcement officials describe as unrivaled among American cities.

Police officials say special units have trained and drilled, for instance, to board cruise ships from helicopters and piers and have begun reviewing floor plans of most large Midtown theaters, conducting exercises inside some to improve their ability to respond to a possible attack, in the aftermath of the deadly siege of a Moscow theater two years ago. This spring, city and federal officials say, the police will work alongside the city health department and other agencies to open a pilot program that they hope will ultimately allow officials to test the air across the city for biological agents quickly and constantly.

The Police Department has also begun to prepare for its role in a sweeping citywide plan to get antibiotics or vaccine to every resident after a widespread attack with biological weapons, and is drafting security plans for about 200 sites that could function as distribution centers.

Officials say the department has even taken to the city's streets to conduct a drill with the city's medical examiner's office to prepare for a chemical weapons attack that would litter the streets with contaminated bodies.

''We're thinking about the unthinkable -- what a few years ago was the unthinkable,'' Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a recent interview, adding that the preparations were not in response to a specific or direct threat. ''It's something we're trying to take head-on, but the scope and magnitude of the problems are daunting.''

Department officials said that much of the planning was still preliminary, and that much remained to be done. And already, they acknowledge, they recognize that some measures may simply be unworkable. The Police Department, for example, has deep concerns about its ability to enforce a quarantine in all or part of the city.

''They are trying to do what Washington is supposed to be doing, but isn't,'' said a former national security official in the Clinton and the second Bush administrations, Richard A. Clarke.

Weeks spent with department officials and exercises in recent months in which officials brainstormed and struggled with the novel problems an attack could pose underscored both the epic challenges facing the city and the size of its ambitions.

Extensive interviews show, among other things, that the Police Department is scheduled to begin chemical and biological training for entire units on Wednesday, with the goal of having 10,000 officers ready in time for the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled for Aug. 30 through Sept. 2 at Madison Square Garden. The department, too, is helping to prepare guidelines so police detectives and F.B.I. agents can conduct joint investigations with city health department epidemiologists in the event of a biological attack.

Some health department officials will also obtain top-secret security clearances so they, too, can use classified information as part of those inquiries, officials said.

The Police Department is also preparing a plan to house and feed thousands of police officers, in some cases in city schools, to help keep them working in the aftermath of a catastrophic attack.

The Lessons of Sept. 11

The agency's past performance in responding to terrorist attacks has not been an unmitigated success. Indeed, some critics have said that major gaps in coordination and planning were evident in its response to the Sept. 11 attacks. But officials say that it was partly to address many of those sorts of issues and to plan for the threats of the future that it brought in a team of experts, including David Cohen, a former top official at the Central Intelligence Agency, and Michael Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism chief under President Bill Clinton.

After a huge attack, officials acknowledge, the responsibilities of the Police Department would be enormous and would potentially create a significant strain on manpower, despite a force of roughly 37,000 that makes it the nation's largest municipal police agency. Officers would be needed to provide security for hospitals, drug distribution centers and other locations. They would also play some role in securing or transporting the drugs from the strategic pharmaceutical stockpile, which is where the city would get antibiotics or vaccine to distribute after a biological attack.

Additional officers would be required to maintain order in a potentially panicky city, which could experience an exodus, at the same time the department would be seeking to increase patrols to deter a possible secondary attack as they were investigating the one that had already occurred.